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The European Union as an actor of global climate regime

In recent years, the concept of EU actorness has received renewed attention in order to try to make it less static, less descriptive and more capable of explaining the real influence of the EU at global level. There is a need for a new way of capturing the external behaviour of the EU, which takes into account not only the legal and institutional characteristics of the EU, but also the global context in which it acts.

The research aims to understand how and to what extent the EU contributes to the development and implementation of the global climate regime through the analysis of the compositional elements of the concept of EU actorness. The latter, in fact, is composed of formal and contextual elements that have been progressively defined. Then, the elements identified are applied to EU climate action in order to determine its role and scope at global level in the field of climate change. It will be argued that these elements need to be specified, developed and integrated to compensate for their inadequacy in describing the real scope of EU action and role in the development and implementation of the global climate regime.

The analysis will lead to the redefinition of the concept of EU actorness in the field of climate change. Furthermore, ascertained that the discipline still lacks a generalizable conceptual framework, an attempt will be made to propose a new model to bring research on actorness to a systematic level and eventually reproducible also outside the EU.